116 Wine-Inspired Quotes

Indulging in a glass of wine often brings more than just flavors to the forefront; it evokes memories, emotions, and a sense of connection. Across centuries, wine has inspired writers, celebrities, and philosophers to pen words that capture its essence and allure. Whether you're a seasoned oenophile or someone who enjoys the occasional sip, the timeless beauty of wine-inspired quotes offers a window into how this cherished libation has woven itself into our cultural tapestry. In this curated collection of 116 quotes, you'll find insights and musings that celebrate the joyful, contemplative, and often humorous relationship we share with wine. So, pour yourself a glass and let these words enrich your appreciation of the vine's finest offerings.

1. “I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.” - W.C. Fields

2. “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.” - Ernest Hemingway

3. “There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.” - Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

4. “and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it's giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water.” - Aimee Bender

5. “One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.” - Charles Baudelaire

6. “Aw I don't wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys.'...But you'll miss all that, just for some old wine.'There's wisdom in wine, goddam it!' I yelled. 'Have a shot!” - Jack Kerouac

7. “Who loves not women, wine and song remains a fool his whole life long” - noauthor

8. “I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.” - Oliver Goldsmith

9. “Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.” - Louis Pasteur

10. “In wine, there's truth.” - Pliny the Elder

11. “Either give me more wine or leave me alone.” - Rumi

12. “Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.” - John Keats

13. “To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history” - Clifton Fadiman

14. “Wine is like the incarnation--it is both divine and human” - Paul Tillich

15. “Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

16. “Wine can of their wits the wise beguile, Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile” - Homer

17. “Beer is made by men, wine by God.” - Martin Luther

18. “If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night” - D. H. Lawrence

19. “A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover” - Clifton Fadiman

20. “Wine makes every meal an occasion, every table more elegant, every day more civilized.” - Andre Simon

21. “in the abstract art of cooking,ingredients trump appliances,passion supersedes expertise,creativity triumphs over technique,spontaneity inspires invention,and wine makes even the worst culinary disaster taste delicious.” - Bob Blumer

22. “Great wine works wonders and is itself one” - Edward Steinberg

23. “There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds. Don't think all ecstasies are the same!” - Jalaluddin Rumi

24. “Accept what life offers you and try to drink from every cup. All wines should be tasted; some should only be sipped, but with others, drink the whole bottle.” - Paulo Coelho

25. “I never think of policemen's wives; their beauty maddens me like wine.” - Kyril Bonfiglioli

26. “If this was the best wine that Jim and Nora could afford or, worse, if this was their idea of a good wine - well, sadly, then they were better off dead.” - Dean Koontz

27. “The worst gift I was given is when I got out of rehab that Christmas; a bottle of wine. It was delicious.” - Craig Ferguson

28. “How much more of the mosque, of prayer and fasting?Better go drunk and begging round the taverns.Khayyam, drink wine, for soon this clay of yoursWill make a cup, bowl, one day a jar.When once you hear the roses are in bloom,Then is the time, my love, to pour the wine;Houris and palaces and Heaven and Hell-These are but fairy-tales, forget them all.” - Omar Khayyám

29. “Nay, Sir, it was not the WINE that made your head ache, but the SENSE that I put into it''What, Sir! will sense make the head ache?''Yes, Sir, (with a smile,) when it is not used to it.” - James Boswell

30. “I am not sure I trust you.""You can trust me with your life, My King.""But not with my wine, obviously. Give it back.” - Megan Whalen Turner

31. “When I opened up the bottle of wine, Thebes said whoa, you yanked that cork out of there like you were saving it from drowning. She got out her markers and drew a screaming face on the cork.” - Miriam Toews

32. “Life's too short to drink cheap wine...” - Cliff Hakim

33. “Sir, I did not count your glasses of wine, why should you number up my cups of tea?” - Samuel Johnson

34. “It's not sipping wine. It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.” - Neil Gaiman

35. “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,Sermons and soda-water the day after.” - Lord Byron

36. “I like on the table,when we're speaking,the light of a bottleof intelligent wine.” - Pablo Neruda

37. “With wine and being lost, withless and less of both:I rode through the snow, do you read meI rode God far--I rode Godnear, he sang,it wasour last ride overthe hurdled humans.They cowered whenthey heard usoverhead, theywrote, theylied our neighinginto one of theirimage-ridden languages.” - Paul Celan

38. “All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own. ” - Monique Truong

39. “What wine goes with Captain Crunch?” - George Carlin

40. “As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.” - Thomas Pynchon

41. “My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.” - Charles Bukowski

42. “I like my coffee black, my beer from Germany, wine from Burgundy, the darker, the better. I like my heroes complicated and brooding, James Dean in oiled leather, leaning on a motorcycle. You know the color. ("Ode to Chocolate")” - Barbara Crooker

43. “[I]t is the wine that leads me on,the wild winethat sets the wisest man to singat the top of his lungs,laugh like a fool – it drives theman to dancing... it eventempts him to blurt out storiesbetter never told.” - Homer

44. “We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.” - Russell Brand

45. “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.” - Mark Twain

46. “I should say upfront that I have never been in a cellar in my life. In fact, I can see no reason why anyone should ever go into a cellar unless there is wine involved.” - Rachel Hawkins

47. “Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.” - Christopher Hitchens

48. “He knew that Hop-Frog was not fond of wine; for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness; and madness is no comfortable feeling.” - Edgar Allan Poe

49. “One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.” - Christopher Hitchens

50. “it's a smile, it's a kiss, it's a sip of wine ... it's summertime!” - Kenny Chesney

51. “Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

52. “It [discovering Finnish] was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

53. “Decidedly he has had too much wine,' I thought” - Charlotte Brontë

54. “I pray you, do not fall in love with me, for I am falser than vows made in wine.” - William Shakespeare

55. “I'd urge you to try German Riesling because it's delicious, but I fear you'll be more impressed if I tell you it's cutting-edge. That, after all, is what we want to know-- what's now and happening. (Do you really think clunky square-toed shoes make your feet look better than those with slimming, tapered toes? You just wear them because that's what fashion dictates, you slut.)” - Jay Mcinerney

56. “Wine enters through the mouth,Love, the eyes.I raise the glass to my mouth,I look at you,I sigh.” - William Butler Yeats

57. “How very like you, Puck.” Ash’s voice came from a great distance, and the room started to spin. “Offer them a taste of faery wine, and act surprised when they’re consumed by it.”That struck me as hilarious, and I broke into hysterical giggles. And once I began, I couldn’t stop. I laughed until I was gasping for breath, tears streaming down my face. My feet itched and my skin crawled. I needed to move, to do something. I tried standing up, wanting to spin and dance, but the room tilted violently and I fell, still shrieking with laughter.Somebody caught me, scooping me off my feet and into their arms. I smelled frost and winter, and heard an exasperated sigh from somewhere above my head.“What are you doing, Ash?” I heard someone ask. A familiar voice, though I couldn’t think of his name, or why he sounded so suspicious.“I’m taking her back to her room.” The person above me sounded wonderfully calm and deep. I sighed and settled into his arms. “She’ll have to sleep off the effects of the fruit. We’ll likely be here another day because of your idiocy.”The other voice said something garbled and unintelligible. I was suddenly too sleepy and light-headed to care. Relaxing against the mysterious person’s chest, I fell into a heady sleep.” - Julie Kagawa

58. “This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.” - Samuel Johnson

59. “There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness—(if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all the time).” - Roman Payne

60. “Wine makes all things possible.” - George R.R. Martin

61. “Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.” - Will Self

62. “If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth', or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea.” - Victoria Finlay

63. “As we hypnotically watch the steadily diminishing reserve of sand in life's hourglass, the instincts of a miser surface. Life is now savored, sipped as with a fine 19th Century French wine.” - Joe L. Wheeler

64. “She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.” - Haruki Murakami

65. “I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations.” - C. JoyBell C.

66. “Of course, my Christmas is (so much more) gorgeous and romantic (than Germany's)!! And unlike the rest of the world, we leave wine behind for Santa Claus!""So Santa-san is delivering gifts to children while driving under the influence . . . ?” - Hidekaz Himaruya

67. “I adore cock and champagne together. My favourite food group.” - D.J. Manly

68. “his lips drink water but his heart drinks wine” - E.E. Cummings

69. “Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and ThouBeside me singing in the Wilderness -And Wilderness is Paradise enow.” - Omar Khayyám

70. “Come boy, and pour for me a cupOf old Falernian. Fill it upWith wine, strong, sparkling, bright, and clear;Our host decrees no water here.Let dullards drink the Nymph's pale brew,The sluggish thin their blood with dew.For such pale stuff we have no use;For us the purple grape's rich juice.Begone, ye chilling water sprite;Here burning Bacchus rules tonight!” - Catullus

71. “Wine and women make wise men dote and forsake God's law and do wrong." However, the fault is not in the wine, and often not in the woman. The fault is in the one who misuses the wine or the woman or other of God's crations. Even if you get drunk on the wine and through this greed you lapse into lechery, the wine is not to blame but you are, in being unable or unwilling to discipline yourself. And even if you look at a woman and become caught up in her beauty and assent to sin [= adultery; extramarital sex], the woman is not to blame nor is the beauty given her by God to be disparaged: rather, you are to blame for not keeping your heart more clear of wicked thoughts. ... If you feel yourself tempted by the sight of a woman, control your gaze better ... You are free to leave her. Nothing constrains you to commit lechery but your own lecherous heart.” - Anonymous

72. “We laughed a lot and I grew warmer still, lovely and warm. I do realize that some of that warmth was due to the wine, but there was much more to it than that. There are two distinct aspects to Communion wine: one aspect is the wine itself, the other is the idea of communion. Wine is certainly warming, but communion is a great deal more so.” - Franny Billingsley

73. “He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.“‘How about my present?’ she demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.“Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer. Ah!“No. No use. Impossible. The will but not the way. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Try again. No. The booze, it must be. See Macbeth. One last try. No, no use. Not this evening, I’m afraid.“All right, Dora, don’t you worry. You’ll get your two quid all right. We aren’t paying by results.“He made a clumsy gesture. ‘Here, give us that bottle. That bottle off the dressing-table.’“Dora brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail.” - George Orwell

74. “Too often we only identify the crucial points in our lives in retrospect. At the time we are too absorbed in the fetid detail of the moment to spot where it is leading us. But not this time. I was experiencing one of my dad’s deafening moments. If my life could be understood as a meal of many courses (and let’s be honest, much of it actually was), then I had finished the starters and I was limbering up for the main event. So far, of course, I had made a stinking mess of it. I had spilled the wine. I had dropped my cutlery on the floor and sprayed the fine white linen with sauce. I had even spat out some of my food because I didn’t like the taste of it.“But it doesn’t matter because, look, here come the waiters. They are scraping away the debris with their little horn and steel blades, pulled with studied grace from the hidden pockets of their white aprons. They are laying new tablecloths, arranging new cutlery, placing before me great domed wine glasses, newly polished to a sparkle. There are more dishes to come, more flavors to try, and this time I will not spill or spit or drop or splash. I will not push the plate away from me, the food only half eaten. I am ready for everything they are preparing to serve me. Be in no doubt; it will all be fine.” (pp.115-6)” - Jay Rayner

75. “Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books” - Stephen Fry

76. “If reassurances could dull pain, nobody would ever go to the trouble of pressing grapes.” - Scott Lynch

77. “Kesan pertama selalu manis – seperti sekeranjang aprikot segar berpadu dengan vanili dan gulali. Meskipun sudah diteguk habis, rasanya tersisa untuk waktu yang sangat lama, baik pahit maupun manis. Bagi saya, cinta yang sesungguhnya seperti itu.” - Winna Efendi

78. “I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It's not a wine, it's a life, right there in the glass.” - Nick Harkaway

79. “You are trying to lure us into revealing information you're not entitled to? With chocolate and wine? Are you amateurs?” - Moira J. Moore

80. “There is truth in wine, but you never see it listed in the ingredients on the label” - Josh Stern

81. “... the vintage of history is forever repeating ~ same old vines, same old wines!” - E.A. Bucchianeri

82. “Most bad," the host concluded. "If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them.” - Mikhail Bulgakov

83. “But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child.” - Donald Miller

84. “There are two things you should never do alone: one is get divorced, the other is drink.” - Cheryl Nielsen

85. “you're not dead-you're dormant.” - Cheryl Nielsen

86. “When you're corked...you're corked!” - Cheryl Nielsen

87. “Men are like wine-some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.” - Pope John XXIII

88. “People of balance age as gracefully as wines of balance.” - John Jordan Jordan Vineyard Winery

89. “One of life's gifts is that each of us, no matter how tired and downtrodden, finds reasons for thankfulness: for the crops carried in from the fields and the grapes from the vineyard.” - J. Robert Moskin

90. “Hold the bottle up to the light; you will see your dreams are always at the bottom.” - Rob Hutchison

91. “The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad.” - William Nicholson

92. “Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.” - Basil Bunting

93. “He'd heard of elvenblossom wine. It was known for its stultifying bouquet of fruit blossoms and the battle-axe power of its alcohol content. Only those of elven blood could stomach the sweet stuff, he'd heard, and it was the alcoholic equivalent of being kicked in the head by a centaur.” - Mark Anthony

94. “I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.” - Ernest Hemingway

95. “They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to be beautiful.” - E.M. Forster

96. “BALLS! We want the finest wines available to humanity. We want them HERE, and we want them NOW.” - Bruce Robinson

97. “I'm prone to tangential digressions, but I've never regretted being remarkably inconsistent:it's led me to fascinating people and interesting stories.” - Natalie MacLean

98. “Когато отпиваше тъмната течност, мъжът разбираше, че жаждата на жената до него е попила много сол, затова и виното го хващаше.” - Radostina A. Angelova

99. “The wine- it made her limbs loose and liquid, made her feel that a hummingbird had taken the place of her heart.” - Jodi Picoult

100. “We look up to see if it is day or night. If stars burn cool and moon does shine, we take to smoke divine and wine. If breath of sun does belch its heat, we boil coffee and prepare to eat.” - Roman Payne

101. “Wine gives one 'ideas,' whereas champagne gives one 'strategies.” - Roman Payne

102. “Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.” - Francis Bacon

103. “And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for awhile; and shall later on be my companion and my helper.” - Bram Stoker

104. “Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)” - Roman Payne

105. “I prefer my water in wine form.” - P.C. Cast

106. “Most days I juggle everything quite well, on the other days there's always red wine.” - Rachael Bermingham

107. “Take a glass of wine while reading, your feet on the back of your slave. This is the best combination of pleasures that is.” - Danny Tyran

108. “Soon you catch your first glimpse of a vineyard basking in the sun, its broad leaves silently turning sunlight into sugar, ripening vitis vinifera, the European grapes that make the world’s finest wines. For a moment you might imagine you’ve been mysteriously wafted to the French countryside, but no, this is the East End of Long Island, the most exciting new wine region in North America. You’ve reached your destination, but your journey of discovery has barely begun” - Jane Taylor Starwood

109. “Love is meant to be sipped, rather than chugged, like a glass of wine you drink strait from the bottle.
” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo

110. “It was baking hot in the square when we came out after lunch with our bags and the rod-case to go to Burguete. People were on top of the bus, and others were climbing up a ladder. Bill went up and Robert sat beside Bill to save a place for me, and I went back in the hotel to get a couple of bottles of wine to take with us. When I came out the bus was crowded. Men and women were sitting on all the baggage and boxes on top, and the women all had their fans going in the sun. It certainly was hot. Robert climbed down and fitted into the place he had saved on the one wooden seat that ran across the top. Robert Cohn stood in the shade of the arcade waiting for us to start. A Basque with a big leather wine-bag in his lap lay across the top of the bus in front of our seat, leaning back against our legs. He offered the wine-skin to Bill and to me, and when I tipped it up to drink he imitated the sound of a klaxon motor-horn so well and so suddenly that spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed. He apologized and made me take another drink. He made the klaxon again a little later, and it fooled me the second time. He was very good at it. The Basques liked it. The man next to Bill was talking to him in Spanish and Bill was not getting it, so he offered the man one of the bottles of wine. The man waved it away. He said it was too hot and he had drunk too much at lunch. When Bill offered the bottle the second time he took a long drink, and then the bottle went all over that part of the bus. Every one took a drink very politely, and then they made us cork it up and put it away. They all wanted us to drink from their leather wine-bottles. They were peasants going up into the hills.” - Ernest Hemingway

111. “One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.” - Victor Hugo

112. “The first miracle Jesus performed was instant winemaking. No wonder people loved Him! He probably received a bunch of wedding invitations after that one.” - Dillon Burroughs

113. “Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang,Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenlang(He who loves not Wine, Women and SongRemains a fool his whole life long)” - Martin Luther

114. “This wine is grand. This poison is grand. It is fine to have good wine to drink, and good poison to kill with, is it not?("The Wondersmith")” - Fitz-James O'Brien

115. “What is blood but the wine of life?” - Vera Nazarian

116. “If your arteries are good, eat more ice cream. If they are bad, drink more red wine. Proceed thusly.” - Sandra Byrd